


A Place on Earth With You

by GoddessOfGanon



Category: Violet Evergarden (Anime)
Genre: A bit of sex ed, F/M, First Times, Pre-Canon, Repressed Feelings, Romance, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 21:17:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16227500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoddessOfGanon/pseuds/GoddessOfGanon
Summary: Gilbert and Violet come to learn what it means to want, and how to express their feelings when words have only ever failed them.-Please read Author's Note at the beginning.





	A Place on Earth With You

**Author's Note:**

> Though the ages/timeline are a bit ambiguous, I derived that Violet is old enough and mature enough to make consenting decisions. For this reason I didn't tag this as 'underage' though if you feel that applies here, then this story may not be for you! I would appreciate the use of discretion in not reading this work rather than leaving unnecessary comments.
> 
> Regardless, I hope that those who do read, enjoy! Violet and Gilbert are such complex characters, I love exploring their dynamic. :)

_ “Major?” _

Her voice passes through the tent canvas before she does, one hand curling around the latch of the tent flap as though she’s wary of causing interruption.

“Yes, Violet?” Gilbert straightens from his hunched position over a pockmarked wooden table draped in a cloth map of the region, topped with several colored pawns to indicate the locations of their current encampments, and the approximate locations of the enemy’s, according to reports sent back from scouts on the front line. The chairs surrounding the table are empty, the occupants long ago dismissed to their own tents to catch up on the must needed rest from which Gilbert withheld himself. 

Violet ducks through the entryway, securing the tent flap behind her. She spins on her heel into a raised arm salute, which Gilbert dismisses with a gentle nod. 

“Major, I was performing my rounds of the camp, and-”

“Violet,” Gilbert’s voice dips in warning. “You’re not scheduled for the night patrol this week. You need to rest.” Violet pauses, holding her breath over her next word as she waits patiently for his discipline to finish. While she accepts commands without hesitation, suggestions often fall on deaf ears. He closes his mouth and gestures for her to continue.

“-and I noticed one of the tents had an unsecure post. I went to alert whoever was inside the tent of this. It was-” Here she stalls, worrying her lips together and not meeting his eye. Gilbert grows tense, feeling the instinct to crouch and take cover. Who could she have seen that would give her pause? Has there been an infiltration by the enemy?

“Lieutenant Colonel Hodgins.” Violet manages to say, though gives pause still after. “With a civilian woman. They were, I’m not exactly sure . . .” 

A ringing in his ears overtakes what follows, for which he is grateful. Though he cannot look away from the words shaped by her lips, outlining the scene, not unfamiliar to Gilbert, of the lieutenant sneaking a woman into his tent for the night. Oh, he is going to  _ kill  _ Claudia. He is going to make his best friend regret revoking what may perhaps be the final shred of innocence this girl possessed amidst the height of a war. He has half a mind to storm to the lieutenant’s quarters right now and tear apart him and whichever woman it was he’s brought to bed this time. They’re currently stationed on the outskirts of a small village; he’d likely brought in one of the sheltered country girls who found his uniform and battle scars to be handsome, and were easily enchanted by tales from the front lines.

Gilbert clears his throat, assuming the stance he often takes when addressing a boardroom of soldiers; shoulders back, chin leveled in a gaze that strikes just above the heads of the group he’s addressing, imparting an indifference that keeps itself from being inflated by his directness of speech. “So they were fucking.” He winces as he says it, feeling his collar tighten around his neck. His eyes are screwed shut, but he knows without having to open them that Violet’s head is cocked to the side in lack of understanding. She repeats the phrase and he winces again. Vulgarity doesn’t become her, and he feels the prickle of shame running down his back. Nearly her entire vernacular is owed to him, though he could have lived well and content without this contribution. 

“Anyway.” He continues, waving a dismissive hand towards the entrance of the tent. “That’s their business, and is no matter to you-”

“But sir,” She interrupts him, and he starts, his arms falling limp at his side. “I want to know more.”

Gilbert freezes, his arm suspended mid-air. 

“I often hear the other soldiers speak of their partners at home.” Violet presses, aware or not of his growing consternation. “They speak of their families. It’s been said before that such relationships have no place on the battlefield. They’re not attempting to conceive a child, are they?” She continues. “It seems hardly the time. For a lieutenant colonel, he should be more responsible.”

“I doubt a child is what they had in mind.” Gilbert coughs into a tight fist and wracks his mind for the means to change the subject. “And you do have relationships, Violet. For example, you and I. As your major, I trust your ability to serve in my unit. Trust is an essential part of a relationship of any sort.”

Violet drops her gaze to her boots, her eyes darting back and forth between each toe. “Yes, but . . . do majors ever kiss their soldiers? Do they ever . . . do what you said earlier?” He wonders if she dodges the term for lack of understanding or lack of imprudence. 

“There are . . . rules against that.” Unbidden, his gaze drops to her lips, her slowly parting lips. Which, quite impossibly, manage to appear soft. He knows what her skin feels like from bandaging her wounds, rough torn patches surrounded by smooth, porcelain skin, nearly doll like. It should be no surprise to him that her lips would feel the same, unmarred, somehow, by war’s callouses. It may be the single grace her ill-starred life has offered her.

Gilbert dares to take a step towards her, his mind becoming clouded with imagined impressions, and they’re standing toe-to-toe. “Violet, is that something you want?” And were his own voice to be played back to him, he would not recognize it. 

“Yes,” Her breath, the flutter of wings, near enough to him he can feel the draft on his chin. “I want . . . that.” 

When has Violet ever spoken to  _ wanting  _ anything?

And when has he ever denied her a request? He had been exhausting himself in the pursuit to get her to  _ feel  _ something, never realizing that he alone was enough.  _ Enough  _ at the height of his hope, yet the way she looks at him now speaks to more than that. Is it fair to her, he wonders, for him to be her everything? The thought skirts into his hopes and raises reservation.

“Sex . . . hurts, the first time. You may not even enjoy it.” He fights not to cringe as he speaks. He knows she’s aware of the basic mechanics; the rudimentary schooling he’d provided  _ had _ included biology, and in a camp full of men she would have picked up the cruder particularities. And one cannot forget where she came from. The furthest recess of that dark island jungle. She was born among animals, that is, if she were born in the first place. Watching her on the battlefield, one may think it impossible for one who kills so thoroughly to come from a mother’s womb. She may have been cleaved from a rock, forged like a sword. Either way, she likely understood  _ hunger  _ and  _ instinct  _ long before he. 

Violet does not flinch from his gaze. “I will enjoy it, if it’s with you.” She says this as though it is the surest thing in the world, her power to simplify evidently able to extend beyond the practical. 

And when he leans in, unable to reign himself, her eyes flutter shut, but not before her gaze warms him to the tip of his boots. “Tell me to stop.” He says, cradling her face between his hands, angling her head so their lips are aligned, but not yet touching.

She draws away only at a distance to meet his gaze, to raise a questioning brow as she shakes her head, pushing against his palms.

“No.” It is the clearest she’s ever spoken to him. 

He has never seen her look at something with the semblance of  _ want.  _ But here, unmistakable and almost predatory, she peers at him from beneath her lashes and her parted lips and sucks in a breath that he at once wishes to take away. They move forward in the same moment, an instantaneous combustion of repressed desire. 

Her taste, like earth and salt and smoke. The power of life between two thin lips, chapped and hard like his own. His grip falters on her shoulders, his hands are shaking. They drop to her waist, weakly pulling her to him. He feels a tremble in the back of his knees, feels he himself may dissolve beyond recover, so with the seeming last of his strength he gathers Violet to him and urges them further into the tent. He pulls her until she can no longer be pulled, and they tumble back onto the taunt canvas of his cot. 

Her hair slips from the weak band holding it at the nape of her neck; the flaxen waves flare around her head, their dull sheen reflecting from the oil lamps against the mossy green canvas. There are high spots of color in her cheeks, a girlish blush that nearly betrays her inexperience, makes her looks _young,_ if Gilbert didn’t know better. She is youthful in appearance, but not young. _Young_ does not describe one who has killed more men than her highest ranking superiors, who was cleaved battlefields while scarcely pausing for breath. If she ever was a child, she is no longer.

He knows he is young, too, particularly for a man of his station. He is only a few years her senior, but given his position he felt himself aged beyond his years. Why, then, has he yet to apply to same logic to her? Truly, they two are both old, old souls who have lost the luxury of calling themselves young.

The uniforms she wore, often his own, swallowed her frame and formed a curtain over her features. Parting this curtain reveals a body of soft and hard planes, seemingly at war with each other. Beneath her clothing he sees the hard lines of endurance training battling against the inevasible curves of womanhood. She is both soft but not, hard but not, like the star she was born from; infinite from all sides.

The flesh of Violet’s stomach is smooth, unmarred by any battle scars, or even the roughness that scores flesh from trekking through grass plains and dense forests, the unforgiving terrain that sets itself up to be a backdrop for war. The underside of her breasts and the turn of her ribcage and dashed with brownish colored birthmarks, like the dappled mares they ride through their countryside voyages.  _ She’s like a warhorse,  _ Gilbert finds himself thinking, before striking the thought from his mind.  _ No.  _ The sight before him is the only thing in this camp that has not been touched by war. 

That changes when he touches her. 

He slides the flat of his palm down the firm plane of her stomach, hoping his callouses aren’t too rough against her soft skin. He stops at her bellybutton, a sight that causes him to pause as if in surprise.  _ So she was born.  _

Marveling, now, he slides his thumb along the shallow pool between her hips, feeling her skin ripple beneath his touch. A bubble of laughter rises from the pit of her belly as she claps her hand over his, “M-m-major!” She giggles, dazedly blinking up at him at the ticklishness subsides. “What is that? Why does it make me laugh?” There is awe in her voice. How well does she know the sound of her own laughter?

In reply, Gilbert repeats the motion, swiping his thumb lower, just above the waistband of her moss green shorts, and higher, along the dip of her waist and up towards her ribs. She curls into his touch, trembling with mirth. She’s never laughed like this, with such abandon or at all. It’s intoxicating, like a sweet gas that fills the room. It is also loud, and he cannot risk interruption, cannot allow a passing soldier to draw back the cover of the tent and see the Major straddling his unit’s newest recruit.

As swift as a bird dives down to its prey, he covers her mouth with his own. To silence her, to swallow the last of her magnetized laughter, to exchange some of his own which overflows from his chest in the rapid rise and fall of his own unsteady rush of breath, the flow of it coursing into her. Violet makes a strangled noise in the back of her throat, stilling like a stone cast into deep water, all laughter ceasing at once. Gilbert watches her eyes flutter close, and her lips part just, as she takes in the foreign sensation of a pair of lips working against her own. 

Gilbert holds her chin still as he takes her upper lip between his, followed by the lower. His kisses are dry, but warm, and having received the model of intimate presses Violet begins to reciprocate with her own movements, following his established pattern as though they are plans to be rehearsed for battle. This routine will soon become stiff, he realizes, and he slides his gloved hand around the back of her neck to angle her chin and slant their lips along a new angle. He has interrupted a pattern, and he can almost hear the whirring in Violet’s mind as she freezes, like she’s stalled by a computing error. Her mental machinery has stuttered to a halt. Gilbert is prepared to draw back and reassure her that they needn’t go any further, and perhaps should not, when-

Her hands are on his chest, parting the row of gilded buttons that run down his uniform. “I saw that woman do this for Lieutenant Colonel Hodgins. May I do this for you?” As she speaks, her hands ruche up the starched fabric of his undershirt, drawing it above his abdomen and above his nipples. Without thinking, he nods, slides his jacket from his shoulders and pulls his undershirt from over his head, tossing it behind him without care as to where it lands.

Violet draws closer to him, setting her hands on his shoulders to balance herself as her lips descend upon his neck and trail down his chest with light, fleeting kisses. Gilbert draws his lip between his teeth to suppress a moan that threatens to wake the whole encampment. He's had few romances in his youth, fewer of which delved into physical territory. Though the situation is not unfamiliar to ones he's been in before, Violet makes it  _new,_ and he finds himself mewling into her hair at the overthrow of sensation to all he's ever known.

“Sir, I’m not doing this right.” She pulls away, heaving a frustrated sigh that stirs the mussed hair of her bangs. “I can’t see anything. I thought I . . . I wanted it to leave a mark.” _Claudia, you lucky bastard._ Gilbert takes in a shuddering breath. His voice nearly catches on the virulent shame of his next words, as he threads his fingers into her hair, securing a hold loose enough for her to break from, which he half expects her to. Half hopes her to, if for no other reason that to bar his own shame.  _“Suck.”_ He chokes out, just as her lips come back into contact with his skin.

Violet leaves kisses that will surely bruise on the skin over which he wears his highest badges of honor. She’s curled into him, her arms folded at his sides. She tucks her head beneath his chin as she layers bruising kisses along the column of his neck as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This is more than just a replication of the actions a passerby glimpsed from an unsecured tent flap. This is a girl seeking warmth in the embrace of a man who has only held her at arm’s distance. _Love has no place on the battlefield._ Her words. But for her sake, he’s enforced protocol, the upright ban on superior relations. As for his sake, he’s rehearsed the script of tact that jerked his eyes away from a gaze that hoped to linger, from the words that welled on the tip of his tongue that would uppen her worldview. It was better for her, and better for him, too. 

That didn’t stop his men, their remarks and their glances. They didn’t dare lay a hand on Violet, even the most foolish of them, though they all expected Gilbert to. She was given to him as a pet, and they expected her to be used as such. To expend his needs, to fulfill them. For this reason he kept his arms folded behind his back when he walked alongside her. When he felt compelled to lay a hand on her shoulder, to comfort her, he did not. When her hair had slipped from its rubber band hold and slipped in front of her eyes and he longed to brush it away, let his hand slide down her cheek, he did not. He did not touch her as he knew how even the most innocent of grazes would be perceived. 

That was lost to them, now. Any lingering propriety had slipped out the tent door when Violet had ventured in. And here Gilbert chases her closeness as if she were the last strand of light in a suffocating darkness.

When Violet pulls away, she looks up at him expectantly. Right. Each act of this night has been one of reciprocation. Gilbert swallows hard, feeling the trails of cooling saliva against his throat as his Adam’s apple jumps to meet his apprehension. “I-I can’t do that to you. I don’t want to hurt you.” 

Her gaze does not waver, but then, only for a second for her to glance down at her own bare chest, her hand forming a not quite fist over her sternum. She raises her eyes back to his in the same moment she drags her nails down her chest, from beneath her breast to her hip. White peelings of skin curl around the three parallel tracks that take a moment to begin to bleed. Gilbert grabs her hand and slams it into the pillow beside her head. His head pounds in anger, unable to look away from the pink and the red smeared across her once glassy smooth chest.

Though the bleeding has already stopped, and the scratches will be healed within a few day’s time at the most, he finds he cannot distinguish between that and if she'd been skewered by a bayonet.  It doesn’t matter, when the cause is  _ him.  _

Unaware, Violet slips her hand from his grip and raises it to his face, her fingers trailing into his hair and guiding him back to her skin. Gilbert shudders, holding the tension in his shoulders despite the urge to melt in her proximity.  He once thought himself a strong man. Yet, by her wordless command, he shapes his lips to her collarbone, teasing the taunt skin there with his tongue. His mouth moves to the space between her breasts, until her reaches the warmed trail left by her hand.

“Is this what you wanted to feel?” Bitterness clouds his voice as his tongue flattens over the scratches, the distant taste of copper tinging the disgust within him, that she would ask for this, and that he, in turn, would give it to her. He scarcely hears her reply, though he feels the pitch of her chest, rising to meet his lips.  _ Yes.  _ She whispers, her hands settling on the back of his neck, her fingertips waltzing in circles on his skin.

For a moment, he finds himself wondering if she loves him. 

The thought is enough for him to pull back, a trembling overtaking his bottom lip. The flame of the oil lamp leaps in reflection of her cerulean eyes, tantamount to the flame of what he can only calculate as being  _desire_ within their depths. 

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself again, because of me." He manages to say, "That’s not what this is supposed to be about.”

Violet nods slowly, her eyes fluttering shut for a moment. 

He thought this would be enough, light kisses and surface explorations. Perhaps he has undervalued the depth of her wanting, believed that the sight of his bare chest, ragged with scars, or his cock, straining at attention from beneath his trousers, would be enough to ward her away. Violet Evergarden does not get  _ scared,  _ but maybe this would do it.

Pushing off the bed, Gilbert finds his knapsack and slings it onto his lap to rifle through it, combing through tins of shaving gel and cracked bars of soap before his fingers find purchase around a trifold packet of rubbers. Military issue. He feels Violet’s eyes trailing him, eyes landing on the packet. “I don’t need another soldier to raise.” He coughs byway of an explanation, resisting the bitter rise in his throat that seeks to remind him that he once thought to throw the packet out, believing himself to be above the weak-willed soldiers who distracted themselves from what was important,  _ the war,  _ with unbecoming sexual engagements. 

_Unbecoming indeed,_ he thinks as he shucks off his trousers and underwear without ceremony. His own will weakening, Gilbert tears the rubber packet with his teeth and sheaths his semi-hardened length. With one hand braced on the desk, he spits into his other palm and drags his fist down his cock, a half-assed attempt at lubrication, he realizes, but it’s not like his government-issued  _ toilette  _ was generous enough to include the sample luxury.  __

Violet has moved her arms behind her head, unknowingly pushing out her breasts and creating the type of image he’s only before seen in the magazines passed underhandedly around the encampment, then glimpsed only by the wavering light of the campfire. She must have seen the woman in Claudia’s tent assume such a pose, the stance of seduction. She rises on her elbows when he approaches the cot, reaching for him. His knees dig into the cot on either side of her hips, his hands wrap around the metal frame to steady himself above her. Violet’s small hands come to rest over his chest, following the trail of hair that leads to the apex of his thighs. She hesitates, then, and looks at him with a question in her eyes, a look that Gilbert understands. She’s asking for orders. Placing a trembling hand over hers, he guides her hand down. And for all his efforts to keep her quiet, his resulting groan when she wraps her hand around his cock seems to echo off the walls of the tent. 

“It’s gotten larger.” Violet notes, curiosity tingling her voice. Her movements are unhurried, exploring, feeling out the hardening ridges with the flat side of her thumb. 

“That’s what happens when a man becomes aroused.” He says through gritted teeth. She doesn’t look as though she’s in need of further explanation, yet the words continue to tumble past his lips. “It-it means I’m attracted to you. Like magnets are attracted to each other.” 

“Some magnets repel each other.” She remarks, turning his cock into her opposite palm and beginning her ministrations anew. Gilbert suppresses another moan, dropping his face to her shoulder.

“Violet, I think the last thing I could possibly find you is repulsive.” A shudder runs through him, the honesty of his own words seizing him in a way he hadn’t expected.  _ You did not realize how quickly you came to mean everything to me  _ is what he would say to her, had he half the nerve the gilded badges decorating his uniform would dictate of a man in his position.  _ However, I myself failed to realize this fact. Until it was too late. Until  _ now.

He distracts himself from this uppending thought by pressing kisses along her neck, one hand reaching between their bodies and slipping beneath her shorts, finding her folds and the wetness between them. He isn’t sure that it’s enough to spare her pain, so he slides his finger along her folds until he finds her clit, circling it with his thumb. He raises his head to see her face. “Does this feel good to you?” She nods wordlessly, her eyes closed, and turns her face to his, her hands falling limp at her sides. Her back arches when he crooks his finger inside her, keeping their lips from meeting, though her staggered breaths blow phantom kisses onto his parted lips.

He continues his ministrations until she’s dripping onto his fingers. He withdraws, then, having collected some of her essence to slide down his cock alongside his cooling spit. Violet uses this time to tear off the rest of her clothing, kicking the accumulation of clothes at the foot of the bed onto the floor. She closes her eyes when he settles himself above her, his arms bent on either side of her head and his body angled just above of hers, his cock pulsing against the inside of her thigh. She must have been expecting a kiss, for when she doesn’t receive one she reaches for Gilbert without opening her eyes and draws him to her, sealing their lips in a mimicry of their earlier kiss, or perhaps the one she saw exchanged in Claudia’s tent, as he finds himself drawn deeper in the dance between their lips and he would swear that  _ he  _ didn’t teach Violet to tilt her chin just so and take his upper lip between her own. She replicates the sucking motion from earlier, drawing a moan from Gilbert’s chest, a suppressed roll of thunder that’d been building since he felt his own cock harden when he applied the rubber, as if in anticipation of this moment. 

He ducks his head to break the kiss, and takes Violet’s chin in his hand, leaning back so their gazes are level. “You must tell me if you are in pain, or if you wish to stop, even in the slightest. And we  _ must  _ be quiet. Do you understand?”

She nods. “I have received your orders, sir.” She speaks in the words he has heard spoken hundreds of times in any number of voices, most often hers, though never like _this._ Never quite so breathy and dripping with expectancy. 

“God, Violet,” He whispers to himself, as though she cannot hear him, in the same moment he pushes himself inside her. 

Her back arches off the bed, her moan mingling passion and pain. Gilbert stills, half of him encased in her pulsing heat while the other half waits, retreating into himself with the apprehension that he’s caused her an irreparable pain. “Breathe, Violet. Take your time,” He tells her through strangled breaths of his own. He lifts his hand from beside her head and intertwines their fingers, squeezing gently. She returns his squeeze, though weakly, and lifts her hips to sheath himself fully inside her.

They move in tandem. She meets his thrusts, returns his kisses to her neck, her chest, to wherever she can reach, his temple, his jaw. They both swallow their moans, aware even in the wash of impending climax that there is a single layer of canvas separating them from the rest of the camp. Gilbert drags his hands through her hair, seals their foreheads together. “Violet.” He pants. “Tell me how you are feeling.”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand it.” She gasps, attempting to lower her voice to a breathy undertone that only he can hear. Her hands flutter over his shoulders, down his arms, unsure and fleeting. They settle on his hips, riding the hastening pace of his movements.

"Good?"

_ "Good." _

When his orgasm comes, it hits him without warning. He buries his face in her shoulder continues to thrust into her, dragging his lips along the column of her throat, hoping his peak will spur her own. “Come, darling. Come for me.” He shapes the words against her neck, her perspiration wetting his lips. And she does, clapping both hands over her mouth to suppress a cry as several sensations, all she’s never felt before, overtake her at once. White overtakes her vision, as though she had been looking at the explosion of a grenade. Her ears are ringing, like a gunshot erupted beside her head. The initial shock of her orgasm has passed, and in the aftershocks she finds familiarity. And when she peels her eyes open, Gilbert is watching her, waiting for her.  

He passes his palm over her face, tucking the sweat slicked strands of hair behind her ear, the longing he’s suppressed for over a year to do the very thing at last catching up with him. He turns away to knot the end of the rubber and toss it into the waste bin of scraped battle plans and empty ink jars that sits at the foot of his desk. “We should get you washed up.” He says, turning back to the cot to find Violet still on her back, her gaze fixed on the pitched ceiling of the tent while tears leak from the corners of her eyes.

“Violet, why are you crying?” He scrambles to reach her, the bed sheet bunching around his knees. He hastily wipes the tears from her cheeks with his thumb, holding her face between his hands.

“I’m crying because you are.” She responds. That is when he realizes that only half of the tears staining her cheeks are her own. Gilbert raises a hand to his face, and cringes at the wetness he finds there. He feels as though he’s been shot, but is only know recognizing the wound.

“I don’t understand.” Violet continues, her voice rising as she speaks while her chest continues to shudder with dry sobs.  “I am not sad. I am so, so happy. I feel light, like air. I feel as though there is a light that is shining from inside me.”

Gilbert draws her close. Their grip on each other is bruising, as they hold and are held and allow the remaining tears to fall.  _ Why am I crying? Why are you crying?  _ Violet whispers against his chest, her small hand folded over his heart. Gilbert runs his hand along her back and arms in hopes to soothe her, while he continues to leak tears into her hair. What is he to say to her, now? What are the words, which so often fail them, that he can use in this moment? Were he to tell her that he is on the edge of shattering, and she was the one who brought him there, she would not understand. And what would she make of the hammering of his heart? By all the means and all the ways he loves her, he finds not the method to tell her other than to ardently pray that she already knows.

Once they’ve settled down, Gilbert moves only to extinguish the oil lamp set on a crate beside his cot before returning to their shared embrace. 

“Should I return to my tent, sir?” Violet whispers into the half darkness.

“No,” Gilbert nearly tosses his own bid to stay quiet and delivers the word like an order, sharp and clear. He intertwines their legs beneath the mess they’ve made of the sheets, and draws the covers to her shoulders in the insinuation she should stay. 

“They were fucking,” She mutters to herself, wondering if experience will now change the foreign tang the words leaves on her tongue. Gilbert starts, instantly disliking the way the vulgarity of the terms seems to discolor their intimacy. "We were fucking too, sir?"

“No . . . we were-”  _ Making love  _ is what he wishes to say, but finds the words do not pass his lips. For that, he’d have to explain what those four letters mean, and if he is in a state to explain, and she is in a state to understand, he does not believe so. "You need not call me sir, Violet." He says instead. She nods against his chest, though he wonders if she'll take the suggestion to heart.

Sleep draws her in, he can tell by the way she curls into him, muscles slackening and her breath thinning. Gilbert knows he will have to rouse her soon, for letting her stay the night would raise too great a risk. He needs his sleep as well, as he has a strategy meeting at dawn with several of his men, Claudia Hodgins among them.

Will Gilbert thank him, for inadvertently mobilizing this coming together between he and Violet? Or will he pass the lieutenant, eyes fixed ahead, acknowledging him only with a slight nod, nearly missable? The subject of the meeting will not allow it, though perhaps he will smile at his friend. They may meet eyes, and that could be enough. He will not need the words, then, his gratitude speechless.


End file.
